e-Governance for healthcare service delivery in India

Abstract

The past e-Governance initiatives in Indian healthcare sector have created silos of digital health data held in the custody of various healthcare providers. In recent times, as part of the National Health Policy, there have been multifaceted initiatives in the healthcare sector with the focus towards providing patient-centric, cost effective and efficient healthcare service delivery to the citizens. This development is bringing fundamental change in the healthcare sector owing to emergence of a revolutionary Federated Digital Healthcare Ecosystem. The ecosystem components like Healthcare Providers, Disease Repositories, Health Information Exchange(s) are planned to be distributed, scalable and dynamically interconnected for patient care and secondary use. In this paper we discuss security and privacy challenges identified for seamless development of the components of this planned ecosystem in the Indian context. We also provide pointers as ready references for designers and researchers of digital healthcare solutions to delve in these open study areas.